Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick - Introduction w/ Jesan Sorrells

0:14 hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 158.

0:26 When we can find a pattern, recognize a trend, or predict a path forward, human beings collectively and individually tend to default to 1 of 3 responses and or reactions to that pattern, to that trend, or to that path forward. We fight, we flee, we freeze. Societies, cultures, institutions and organizations behave in the same way as individual people, except they do it at scale. And ever since the Post World War II promises of political, cultural and social advancement have proven to be so much smoke and mirrors in the early 21st century.

1:08 We in the west have resisted the advancements that we have received and we have fled ignominiously into entertainment and hedonistic whimsy. Or we have encased ourselves willingly and into inaction, indecision and stasis. But none of these reactions of flight, freezing or freeing are happening in a vacuum, and the ways in which societies, cultures, institutions and organizations attempt to manage their reputation, resources and reactions is rarely as opaque as they believe it is. Which brings us to our author today.

1:50 Today on the show solo episode, we will be introducing the author, exploring some of the dominant themes, and expressing some of the thoughts I have on one of these seminal science fiction novels of the mid to late 20th century. It is a book that predicted with dreary certainty the world we in the west currently inhabit, and continues to predict with dreary certainty the technological and social world we are about to inhabit. Just about five minutes from now, the basis for the movie blade runner from 1982, we will be introducing and discussing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

2:40 By Philip K. Dick Leaders we get the world we want either through action or inaction. Either path is a choice and no choices can be made without consequences.

3:01 So as usual, we will be summarizing some of the themes that we are going to be exploring here and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? We will not be reading directly from the book. Instead, what we're going to be doing is we're going to be talking about specific chapters and areas and sort of a broad summary because this book is still under copyright and we do respect copyright here on this show. So when you open up new Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, you are introduced to a world that is ashy, a world that is covered in gray dust, a world that is declining, an earth that is declining as a result of a third world war that was indeed nuclear.

3:51 Chapter one opens up with us being introduced to a man named Rick Deckard, played in the movie by Harrison Ford. Now, Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter. He's an independent contractor hired by the police to, to hunt down and to quote, unquote, retire androids that have escaped from the Martian colonies and returned to Earth where it is illegal for an Android to be. We're introduced to his wife, Iran, and I did say Iran I R A N. And his wife is struggling with some mental health problems, depression, anxiety.

4:36 And she finds safety by grabbing the handles of and by engaging with something called an empathy box and engaging with the religion of mercerism. More on that later. Rick also has a sheep. Now, the sheep is part of the setup of the book and the sheep is not a live sheep. It's an electric sheep, which, you know, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? That's sort of where the title really kicks off. And so we open up the book, we open up the story, and nothing much happens in the first couple of chapters but this.

5:19 Then Rick is on his way to work and he is seeking to figure out how to get a live animal because everything is floating in ash on the Earth. Everything is denuded. As a matter of fact, one of the things that many of the characters point out in doandroids Dream of Electric Sheep is that, no, all the human beings basically that could leave, could emigrate from Earth have already emigrated to go to other places like Mars or other interstellar settlements. And all the folks that are left on the Earth are living in the remains, living in the rubble of what was once a great society, particularly what was once a great city in known as San Francisco.

6:06 By the way, when I say that there are no live animals, there's a whole running piece inside of of the book that is really focused on the value of a. Of a live animal. And there is a magazine and this is going to come back, come back to haunt us a little bit later on in the book. A catalog actually called Sydney's. And Sydney's catalog is a catalog that prices live animals. This is going to come back later on when Rick Deckard runs into Rachel Rosin with some interesting consequences that will come about from that.

6:56 Now that we've laid out some of the opening themes, some of the initial themes that are in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, let's take a look at the literary life of of Philip K. Dick. From his Wikipedia article and a few interviews, we were able to glean numerous details about the man's life, both directly from his mouth and from things that other people wrote about him. Philip Kindred Dick was born December 16, 1928 and died March 2, 1982. He was an American science fiction writer and novelist.

7:37 A prolific yet troubled creative, he wrote 44 novels and about 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. As a matter of fact, Philip K. Dick struggled as a science fiction writer until Duandro's Dream of Electric Sheep really took off, as well as probably his most notable notable book, which was turned into an Amazon, an Amazon studio streaming show a few years ago, the man in the High Castle. His fiction explored very various and varied philosophical and social questions such as the nature of reality, the nature of perception, what exactly is human nature and identity.

8:25 And his stories commonly featured characters struggling against against elements that they could not understand and had trouble identifying, such as alternate realities, illusory environments, monopolistic corporations, and even monopolistic governments, drug abuse, authoritarian governments, and most interestingly, altered states of consciousness. Philip K. Dick was primarily raised by his mother after a vicious divorce where his mother refused to move basically across the country. Well, not really across the country, but from one state to another state with his father, who by the way, his father worked as a writer for the U.S. department of Agriculture.

9:11 I am firm in my belief that the process of the divorce and the way in which he was raised by his mother, first in Washington D.C. and then later on in San Francisco, deeply impacted psychologically, the young Philip K. Dick. Matter of fact, it affected him, impacted him. Infected is probably a good term. Impacted him so deeply psychologically that he was unable to really be effective in school. Particularly during a mid century time when conformity in school was thought to be the highest honor that you could possibly have as a student.

9:50 A genuine king in his own mind. Dick dropped out of college because it bored him. He took a lot of classes, he did a lot of things, but he never landed on a major and he never received a degree from the University of California, Berkeley. At the time, by the way, UC Berkeley hadn't yet become a haven for hippie dumb and progressive and later on, Marxist thought. By the way, the reason he dropped out of college, the reason that was stated according to his third wife Anne's memoir about him, the reason that he dropped out was because of ongoing anxiety problems.

10:28 And I tend to believe that that was probably true. And also pointed out that Dick really didn't want to be involved with or engaged around mandatory ROTC training. As a matter of fact, when you look at Philip K. Dick and you look at George Orwell, both of their relationships to power influenced later on and hierarchy influenced later on their relationships and how they wrote about the relationships between individuals and a hierarchy. A man driven by confusion, driven by anger and perplexity at the world and his place in it, and a man seeking answers to questions in all the wrong places.

11:09 Philip K. Dick was a complicated individual who did not have an easy life. He also experimented and dabbled in drugs, as did many people of his generations of his generation. But he came to significantly different conclusions about that drug use and about the results of that dabbling. Science fiction was an outlet for Philip K. Dick. It was a way for him to express all of the ideas and thoughts, thoughts and feelings that he could not successfully express to others and also gave him away, quite frankly, to be weird fellow.

11:47 K. Dick was not Robert Heinlein, although Robert Heinlein was, was a friend of his. He was not Charles Gibson. He was also not Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury. Those guys were at least a generation older than him. Philip K. Dick was part of a new generation of science fiction writers who were utilizing science fiction in order to work out therapeutically their own psychoses and of course, to project their own ideas of a new world and new men on to readers both now and readers that would read them later on in the future.

12:34 Back to our analysis of the book, back to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. So we pick up in chapter three of the book and Rick Deckard goes to the, the San Francisco police station. Now it's a newly built police station in a different part of town and, and it's called the hall of justice on Lombard Street. And when he arrives, he is informed in no uncertain terms that a new unit of Android has been released called the Nexus 6 brain unit or the Nexus 6 Android. And the Nexus 6 Android is, is, is, is supposed to be designed so that it can be unidentifiable, so that it can be, it can be indistinguishable from human beings.

13:36 He finds out that a colleague of his is in the hospital from having killed or retired one of these Nexus 6 robots, sorry, androids, and that there are something like six more of them floating around the earth somewhere. He's also ordered by his boss, a Mr. A Mr. Bryant, to, to go out to the. Go out to the, the, The Rosen Corporation. And the Rosen Corporation is an organization or it's the organization that creates the, and, and makes the Nexus 6 robots. As a matter of fact, they make all of the Nexus 6 here saying robots, Nexus 6 androids that are on the Earth.

14:22 And whenever an Android escapes, it is the responsibility of the manufacturer to make sure that that Android is brought back. They of course, cannot do this without the help of the police, and the police cannot do this without the help of the bounty hunters. And thus, that is the virtuous circle. Rick Deckard is equipped with something called a Voight Conf Test. V O I G T K A M Pff. And the Voight Komp test measures the level of empathy that a human has versus an Android, or the level of empathy or empathetic responses that an object has, and then identifies the difference between the empathetic responses of an Android versus the empathetic responses of a human being.

15:08 Now, primarily this is done through questioning individuals or questioning androids and measuring their, their biologic and their mechanical responses to the. To the questions. Because without being able to do that, the Nexus 6 Androids can effectively pass for human. Deckard goes to the Rosin Corporation and he administers the Voight Conf test to a woman named Rachel Rosin. And it is revealed through the failure of Rachel Rosin to pass the empathy test that the Rosin association of the Rosin Corporation has indeed created a an Android.

16:00 And Rachel Rosin is one of the Nexus 6 androids. Not the one that has escaped from the Martian colonies, but one that was created in order to live here on Earth. Now, of course, it is illegal for androids to live on Earth in the Earth of Do Androids dream of electric Sheep? And this sets up Rick Deckard as our not only as our protagonist, but also as our also gives him motivation for going out and pursuing, getting the bounty by killing these or retiring these Nexus 6 androids. But of course, just like everything else, Rick Deckard cannot do this act successfully alone.

17:07 He who fights with monsters might take care, lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. Frederick Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, 1886.

17:33 When we think about Philip K. Dick and when we think about some of the themes in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I think of that line from Beyond Good and Evil. Now what we've covered Nietzsche on this podcast, we've talked about Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And as you know, if you listen to that episode way back in season one, I am not a big fan of Frederick Nietzsche. I. I think that he played the classic Two lies and a truth. And he did it a lot with folks. And as a philosopher, he left something to be desired.

18:12 However, his words have impacted other folks and they have caused people to think about reality differently. And of course, the people that he influenced the most were people who were in ways of personality and temperament and probably even intellect, most like him. And these are people who are looking for and looking at and looking down the barrel of post World War II nihilism. We kind of stumbled across this a little bit when we were discussing George Orwell in 1984 and we did not cover on the podcast this year Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which is the other end of the spectrum on this.

18:56 But both of those novels and Brave New World is a little more science fictiony than 1984 and a little actually significantly better written. Both of those, both those novels look at and view future dystopias not necessarily with. With glee, obviously, but mostly with a sort of mute horror. But it's a mute horror that goes along with or is accompanied by a sense of the inability to act as if events merely happen to a person. They can do very little to respond. Philip K. Dick was a drug user. And as a drug user he was very much influenced by Aldous Huxley's writing, in particular Aldous Huxley's writing and thoughts around lsd.

19:50 Now, Dick used lsd, or maybe he didn't use lsd. There's, there's a little bit of lack of clothes clarity around that. But I can say that in an interview that he gave before his death, he did admit that he had seen people use drugs and that many of the brightest minds of his generation had been consumed by drugs and that drugs were indeed a bad deal. However, Dick was also a free thinker and he had an FBI file on him, most notoriously for being associated with avowed communists and Marxists as well as.

20:31 Because one of the jobs that you could get as a low paid or lowly paid science fiction writer, one of the only jobs you could get in the middle part of the 20th century was working with high school students and teaching them, of course, influencing minds for the future.

20:51 But with all that being said, Dick didn't gloss over the negative effects of drug use and their impact on. And this is where he was mostly interested in drug use, their impact on the nature of belief. Philip K. Dick had some interesting views about the nature of reality and the nature of transcendence and the nature of God, much of which showed up into Android Stream of Electric Sheep. But some of that also showed up in, in his book, the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. And that was a book he wrote, quote.

21:23 I wrote that after reading a magazine article on hallucinogenics by Aldous Huxley. Drugs have taken the lives of some very, very dear friends of mine. Close quote. He had a different view on drug use than most free thinkers did back in the 1960s and 1970s. And one of the key themes that is revealed in Duan Droid's dream of Electric sheep is the idea of the nature of the differences in perceptions of reality between people with organic brains, like Dick, like you, like me, like anybody listening to this show today, and objects that embody the anthropomorphized reflections of the human beings around them.

22:08 Or another way of saying, this is when we put on our objects the things that we come up with, the perceptions of reality that we come up with out of our own brain. And if those perceptions are influenced through the use of hallucinogenics or psychedelics, our nature and our perception is going to then be strange as we anthropomorphize our objects forward. By the way, just in case you think I'm crazy, the guy who founded Apple Computers, one of the two guys, Steve Jobs, he was an avid LSD user in the 60s before he founded Apple Computers.

22:51 And as a matter of fact, the logo of Apple Computers, the apple, is taken from the story of. Of. Of a Turing, right, Alan Turing, who during World War II came up with the idea of artificial intelligence, but also came up with the idea of a way to test whether or not a computer system was quote, unquote intelligent. And Turing, of course, died of suicide taking, if I remember correctly, arsenic out of an Apple. Hmm.

23:59 Back to the book, back to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? So we're going to pick up in the middle part of the first part of chapter 10. And this picks up or this, this is right in the middle of the retiring by Deckard of several of the androids. As a matter of fact, this. This chapter picks up right after he. He fails to retire. And one of the Nexus 6 Androids named Luba Luft, who is posing as an opera singer and performer in. In. In San Francisco, and he goes to Luba and he administers the Void conf.

24:48 Test, she or the Android, it immediately rejects the questions that are being submitted to it in the course of the Void comp test, and then calls an Android cop, another Nexus 6 Android, to come and arrest Rick. And when that arresting or when that arrest Happens, Rick is taken to the Mission street hall of justice building. And so what the. What the Nexus and Nexus 6 Androids have done, which is really quite clever actually, is they've created an entire separate ecosystem for aping or for pretending to be engaged in law enforcement in order to fool bounty hunters.

25:35 And this, this fooling of bounty hunters has worked so well that they actually have a human bounty hunter working for them underneath and taking the orders from an Android as his boss. And so this bounty hunter is named Phil Resch. Phil Resch works under the Android. Garland does not know that Garland is an Android. And when Rick is then brought to this, the second police station and is taken into Garland's office for question questioning, Phil Resch comes in and states that he is going to. He's going to deliver a.

26:15 A test to. To. To Deckard. And the test that he is going to deliver that Phil is going to deliver to Deckard because Phil believes that Deckard is the. Is the. Is the Android. That test is a. Is a little bit of a different test than the Voight Kampf test, although it does measure the same basic. The same basic idea or the same basic tendencies around empathy. Now when this test is. Is delivered, and by the way, that's called the Benelli reflex arc test, when this test is, is. Is delivered, or when Phil actually goes to get the gear to deliver the test, Garland reveals to Rick that he's really an Android.

27:02 Rick asks Garland, does Phil know? Garland says Phil doesn't. And then Rick proceeds to retire Garland. When he comes back, or when, when Phil comes back,

27:17 the, The, The. The inter. The interaction right, between Rick and Phil becomes. Oh my. It becomes, it becomes a little fraught. And by the way, I have that wrong. I just, I just read in the, in the chapter, just looked at it, actually. Resh was the one that fired at Garland and retired him. So I apologize there. Let me correct that right up front. Anyway, so the interaction between Phil, this is what I want to focus on. The interaction between the human Phil and the human Rick now becomes fraught with suspense, right?

27:54 Because Rick had a thought, and this is very, very interesting. He had a thought that maybe he was crazy, right? Or that maybe he was an Android himself. Matter of fact, when he went to retire Luba Luft, he was wondering if he had the ability to retire an Android or if he was beginning to feel empathy for the androids. Phil, on the other hand, Phil Rash, the other bounty hunter, had. Has already begun to move through to the other side of the veil from where Rick is now in the story, as a matter of fact, Phil and Rick commiserate in the car.

28:31 They talk about the Nexus 6 androids, they talk about the Bonelli test, they talk about retiring. And you know, Rick has his suspicions about Phil, Phil has his suspicions about Rick. Rick and both of them have to decide are they genuinely really human or are they posing? And this creates a real existential crisis for Rick that continues to drive the remainder of his actions as a bounty hunter forward in the book. Even drives his interaction with Rachel Rosin, his purchase of another animal from Sydney's catalog.

29:16 And finally the retiring of Roy Batty in a abandoned and dilapidated apartment building later on in the story. This idea that, that, that k. That that Philip K. Dick introduces in this story, this idea that two human beings would struggle to find the humanity with each other in themselves because their recognition of that is being blocked by their concerns about androids. And their level of empathy is part of their. That theme that Dick often explored in his book around, well around the challenges of seeing through illusory environments, dealing with monopolistic corporations like the ones that created the Nexus 6 androids.

30:20 And the nature and even the androids questioned this with Deckard and Phil. The nature of who works for and enforces the rules of authoritarian government.

30:51 One of the more compelling questions that is that is proposed in, in Philip K. Dick's book do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? One of the more compelling questions that's proposed is a, is a question that is actually framed in our time better by the character from the movie Avengers, Age of Ultron. The, the. The robot, in essence the Android that is the creation of Jarvis, a combination of Jarvis and Tony Stark's Iron man armor. The character Ultron in the movie Ultron asks a question or makes an observation actually after utilizing his AI, his large language model driven brain to examine all the inputs that Tony Stark has placed on him.

31:48 And Ultron makes this observation about the Avengers. He says, and I quote, you want to protect the world, but you don't want it to change. This is actually an important point because Philip K. Dick wanted to change the world, but he didn't. He didn't know what it was going to be changing into. And there are many folks who have come after Philip K. Dick who have also experience this sense of and this, the experience, the handcuffs of stasis in the world. Peter Thiel points this out not only in his book Zero to One, but he'll talk about it on any podcast that he is invited on to.

32:35 It's this idea of believing that the future will be brighter, but not taking any steps to making sure that the future will actually be brighter, not taking any action. And there are several themes in Doandroids Dream of Electric Sheep that we did not cover today. On this, the introductory episode to the book. We didn't cover how Philip K. Dick looked at the future world as an incredibly low trust society that was experiencing decay, not just interpersonal decay, but decay at, at a scale that could only be brought about by a third world war.

33:14 We didn't talk about the aspects of sexual exploitation that are in the novel as well. Philip K. Dick actually did a speech one time talking about can there be sex between androids and human beings. We didn't talk about the phenomenon of quote unquote chicken heads. That's in the book. Individuals who cannot escape the Earth and are decaying in the dust of the nuclear war. And it's impacting their brains, it's lowering their IQs, it's impacting how they think. And they can't escape, they can't get away, they can't go to Mars, they can't go to interstellar colonies, they can only remain on a dying Earth.

33:55 And of course, we did not touch on mercerism, an entire religion designed to, to engage in and create empathy with empathy boxes. But then there's a whole reveal at the end of the novel between Buster Friendly and Amanda about the nature of mercerism that the Nexus, Nexus 6 robots believe will destroy that belief and will allow human beings or will force human beings to accept androids as well human. You want to protect the world, but you don't want it to change. That's key because the materialistic perspective we are confronted with in New Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a logical outgrowth of the end of evolutionary theories of human development.

34:50 The same evolutionary theories that are driving much of our. And we're going to talk about this in the next section. Much of our deployment of robotics and of LLMs that we are now on the cusp of taking to scale in the very near future. However, this all comes with a challenge that we can't seem to philosophically name, or at least we can't articulate it, but we can philosophically name it and we have a sense of disquiet around it. The challenge is that if our objects treat us as gods because we created them, how long will it be before our objects perceive that we only have feet of clay?

35:31 In a speech in 1972, Philip Dick talked about this. He said that many of our drives originate from the subconscious as human beings. And that subconscious controls us and makes us predictable. But according to Dick, we all have attributes of an Android. As he later goes on to say, androidization, which is an interesting word, requires quote unquote predictability. And if our subconscious leads us to predictability, then it is something that is completely out of our control, meaning the merging of ourselves and our technology is unavoidable.

36:04 Dick does not believe that to be an Android has any relation to physical attributes. He talked about this in his speech in 1972. Instead he said being an Android is to be pounded down, to be manipulated without consistent consent. And that is something that lies at the core of the androids problem. The, the core of Roy Batty's problem, the core of Luba Luff's problem, even the core of, of Rachel Rosin's problem. In the novel,

36:36 Dick believed that the world can only be made new by resisting the pull towards a denuded, flat and hedonistic worldview, while at the same time resisting the pull in the opposite direction towards a worldview that separates our objects from ourselves and looks at them and views them and treats them as mere, well, things which way? Future Western man,

37:09 foreign.

37:23 So as we round the corner to our ending here of our show today, our introduction to our episode today, which is an introduction to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep By Philip K. Dick and I would encourage you to go out and, and get a copy of this novel. You can find it pretty much anywhere or you can find it in a collection of, of novels. I have, I have my copy in a collection called Counterfeit Unrealities that was published by oh gosh, Science Fiction Printing in May of 2022. And there are three books in, in this, in this, in this novel or in this, in this collection.

38:07 The three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch obviously do Androids, Juvenile sheep. Actually there's four. So the stigmata Android Drew Electric Sheep which we're focused on today, Ubik and a scanner darkling go out and pick up a copy of that collection today. So solutions to problems, right? Philip K. Dick proposes several different problems that I think have already started showing up in the world. Probably started showing up 25 years ago with the beginnings of the proto beginnings of social media and were probably, probably going to show up anyway with the advent of the commercial Internet being turned on in 1989.

38:53 These problems that Philip K. Dick has proposed and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep we're about to be confronted with and I don't think we have any really Good answers for any of these problems. As a matter of fact, I'm not even quite sure we have a bunch of clarity on what the problems are that we are really going to face. So here's one problem we're about to be confronted with. Embodied objects and what that actually means in the world. Sure, we've had objects in the world before. I mean, look around your, your, your room or look around your car if you're driving.

39:31 Right now in our time, the best example of artificial intelligence and the best example of an artificially intelligent driven robot is a Tesla vehicle. But they're about to get a lot more humanoid looking. And we're already seeing the initial proposals for robot companions showing up in the marketplace, LLM driven autonomous robots to work in our factories and to provide security from, for our homes and our businesses. And of course we are seeing the rise of, and the proposals for humanoid slaves to do the work that we don't want to do.

40:09 Whether that work is physical, psychological, and of course we're going to try to push the boundaries to having them, or demanding that they do that work in the spiritual and psychological realm as well. These proposals are being resisted. And this is another next level problem. The resistance to these sorts of proposals and these proposals are being resisted in all forms primarily because the utility of such proposals really does nothing to address that genuine real problems humans have, particularly humans in the west, and of course human specifically in America, but humans globally.

40:51 And the problems that we have are quite frankly the ones that are generated by too much leisure, too much boredom and too much hedonism. When you have everything that you want at your fingertips and all your material desires are fulfilled, another object to fulfill material desires is probably not the solution to your problem. Hmm. And that's just a couple of problems we will be confronted by in the next 10 to 15 years. Look, the way forward is neither going to be easy, nor is it going to be entirely predictable, other than predictable in the fact that human beings will continue to perform in ways that feed their most base appetites.

41:43 And of course, other human beings will resist such appeals, and the vast majority of human beings will be confused by the question and will slowly and painfully adapt. But one thing is for sure. Next 10 to 15 years that Philip K. Dick predicted will be neither a dystopia nor, nor will it be a utopia. It will probably be closer to something like, well, just another advancement in your normal life.

42:24 And, well, that's it for me.